Obsidian Lenguas Necklace

Two tongue-shaped elements hang side by side at the pendant — one in polished silver, one in volcanic black obsidian — held in a horizontal silver collar and suspended from a chain of hand-formed silver balls, with obsidian beads introduced in alternation to flank the pendant drop. The design takes its name, lenguas, from those pendant forms, and Spratling himself applied the label "rococo repoussé" to the overall composition — a characteristically irreverent description for what is, at its core, a study in material contrast resolved through repetition of form.

Obsidian is not incidental here; it is the argument. A volcanic glass native to the Mexican highlands and worked by Mesoamerican craftsmen for millennia, it carries a material history that no imported gemstone can replicate. Spratling's understanding that local pre-Columbian materials carried both cultural weight and aesthetic force was foundational to his design philosophy, and this necklace enacts it plainly: the stone chosen for the pendant is seeded back through the flanking chain, so the composition reads as a single coherent object from clasp to drop rather than a pendant on a generic chain.

The same Lenguas form was also produced with gold plate substituted for obsidian, which confirms it as a named, recurring model in Spratling's vocabulary rather than a single commission. Its period — circa 1945 to 1956 — places it in the years after Spratling had resigned from Spratling y Artesanos and relocated to his ranch workshop at Taxco-el-Viejo, working at a scale and pace that suited his most considered output.